'Godfather of Al' now fears it's unsafe. He has a plan to rein it in

Large language models and machine learning are just small parts of today's Al landscape. Another key addition Bengio's team are adding to Scientist Al is the "world model" which brings certainty and explainability. Just as humans make decisions based on their understanding of the world, Al needs a similar model to function effectively.

- BY LECTURER, SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

This week the US Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed two men suspected of bombing a fertility clinic in California last month allegedly used artificial intelligence (AI) to obtain bomb-making instructions. The FBI did not disclose the name of the AI program in question.

This brings into sharp focus the urgent need to make AI safer. Currently we are living in the "wild west" era of AI, where companies are fiercely competing to develop the fastest and most entertaining AI systems. Each company wants to outdo competitors and claim the top spot. This intense competition often leads to intentional or unintentional shortcuts especially when it comes to safety.

Coincidentally, at around the same time of the FBI's revelation, one of the godfathers of modern AI, Canadian computer science professor Yoshua Bengio, launched a new nonprofit organisation dedicated to developing a new AI model specifically designed to be safer than other AI models and target those that cause social harm.

So, what is Bengio's new AI model? And will it actually protect the world from Al-faciliated harm?

An 'honest' Al

In 2018, Bengio, alongside his colleagues Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, won the Turing Award for groundbreaking research they had published three years earlier on deep learning. A branch of machine learning, deep learning attempts to mimic the processes of the human brain by using artificial neural networks to learn from computational data and make predictions.